Northbank Center (Industrial Savings Bank)

Northbank Center (Industrial Savings Bank)

Northbank Center (Industrial Savings Bank) Photograph by Kathryn Bishop Eckert
1922–1923, Davis, McGrath and Kiesling; 1986 rehabilitated. 432 N. Saginaw St.

The Industrial Savings Bank was founded in 1909 to serve north-side merchants and factory workers, but it was later expanded to serve the entire city. Its founders and early officers were a group of automobile magnates, including Walter P. Chrysler, Charles W. Nash, A. B. C. Hardy, and Charles Stewart Mott. According to the Flint Daily Journal for December 13, 1923, Davis, McGrath and Kiesling of New York City designed this bank after “the ancient Temple of the Winds at Athens.” The first four floors and the two upper floors carry Grecian motifs. Variegated Indiana limestone and light-colored pressed brick sheathe the twelve-story, steel-frame, reinforced-concrete modern eclectic building. Its three-story base is delineated by fluted pilasters with foliated capitals and the building is crowned with a wide copper cornice, punctuated with anthemions and lions' heads, that projects from the eleventh floor to form a railing. The lower floors held the bank; the middle floors, offices; and the upper five floors, the club facilities of the Industrial Mutual Association, a benefit society that provided carriage and auto workers with the equivalent of health and life insurance. The Realty Construction Company of Flint built the bank. In 1986 it was rehabilitated for offices and retail use.

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